I find myself wasting a lot of time creating calendar events that share a lot of properties, but differ in time of occurrence and duration. Auto-complete still requires per-field interaction.

For example, a band may rehearse regularly, but not on a fixed, repeating schedule that can be cleanly accommodated by a calendaring app’s recurring event interface. You want to be able to easily create an event involving the same people (your bandmates), usually at the same place (your rehearsal studio), with a varying date and duration.

Templates to the rescue.

Event Templates Pane

Once dropped to the calendar area, the template title text is given keyboard input focus to allow renaming from the default.

A Custom sorting option allowing the user to arrange the templates however they like might be useful. The set of templates you use may change over time as you work on different projects.

Double-clicking a template opens the editor.

Modifications to events created from templates do not propagate back to the template.

Deleting a template has no effect on events created from the template.

A menu command allows a stand-alone event to be used as the basis for a new template.

Event Template Editor

Modifications to templates do not propagate to events created from them.

As they exist outside of specific dates, only a default duration is set on a template.

All other properties can be set as with normal events.

Problems

Templates would not work cleanly in Contactizer‘s All events list view. What happens when you drop a template event to the list? A title field and date/time picker could appear at the drop point. It’s still likely to be less input than creating the event from scratch.

Rescheduling an event to another day using the mobile Calendar app on the iPhone requires at least six taps across four screens. The method depicted below reduces the minimum taps to two with the number of screens depending on how many days the event is moved.

In Day view, tap and hold the event.

With your other hand, tap the forward (or back) triangle button in the date bar.

Alternatively, while still holding the event, swipe from right to left to go to the next day (or vice versa for the previous).

The event is moved to the next (or previous) day at the same time. The event box would always remain beneath the tapped spot, nudging overlapping event boxes aside if necessary.

I find the dots below days with scheduled events useful in the mobile Calendar application. They should appear in iCal’s mini-calendar as well.

Using a few different size dots based on the number of events scheduled would allow users to see which days are particularly busy without having to switch the main view mode to Month or view the particular day — without adding much visual clutter. Granted, I don’t have the busiest schedule.